1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a copy control method and copy control apparatus applied to a data processing system having the function of reproducing and outputting data, such as movies or music, compressed by, for example, the MPEG 2 standard. Such data is referred to herein as “provided data.”
The present invention relates to a copy control method and copy control apparatus which, when recording and reproducing the data recorded on a large capacity recording medium, such as a CD-ROM or a DVD (digital video disk), as copied data, enables the reproduction of the copied data to be controlled by the specific control information recorded on the medium.
The present invention relates to a method of and apparatus for controlling the copying of data supplied by communicating through a computer system having the function of receiving provided data, such as movies or music, via communication means and reproducing and outputting the provided data.
2. Description of Related Art
For systems that reproduce and output data supplied from the film industry or the music industry, compressed by the MPEG 2 standard, copy protection techniques are required to prevent unauthorized copying.
When providing data by computer systems that reproduce and output the data, it is essential to establish highly reliable copy protection techniques capable of preventing unauthorized copying. These copy protection techniques must not be capable of being broken by computer processing.
With conventional copy protection techniques of this type, copy protection data is also recorded on a recording medium, such as a CD-ROM on which the provided data has been recorded, and the copy protection data, together with the provided data, is read and transferred to a copy protection unit, which performs a copy protection process on the provided data, thereby preventing unauthorized copying.
In conventional copy protection techniques, however, the copy protection process is not carried out until the provided data recorded on the disk has been transferred to the copy protection unit. This permits intentional unauthorized copying of the provided data in a system configurations having a computer acting as a transfer unit between the disk reading unit and reproducing unit.
As described above, with a conventional system where the provided data is exchanged via a computer, a highly reliable copy protection technique capable of preventing unauthorized copying has not been established. When a computer system is used that enables part of the provided data to be selectively read into the computer and used this leads to the problem of permitting the unauthorized copying of all of the provided data.